A dark and thoroughly engrossing novel, filled with richly drawn scenes and characters out of the underbelly of NYC, this is a great addition to the growing list of circus/sideshow centric books that have come out in the past few year. Following the four main characters through this novel was a fantastic way to spend a few hours!

There's not a ton I can share with you about Church of Marvels that won't give away some of the more OMG-inducing moments as you read this fantastic debut novel. You have a set of twin circus performers, a privy cleaner who finds an abandoned baby in an outhouse. There is a carnival (the Church of Marvels). There is death, and there is fire. There is trouble followed by journeys fraught with peril. You have families, circus freaks, gritty, sexually-moral and amoral people around every turn. Some of the bits are unsettling, but they're all written with a delicate and not overly graphic hand.

Another aspect of the story that shines is the history and sense of place. This is another great example of well-done historical fiction, and reminded me of Alice Hoffman's The Museum of Extraordinary Things (one of my all-time favorites) in places. Parry has done extensive research and brings Manhattan and the city to life.

A ravishing
first novel, set in vibrant, tumultuous turn-of-the-century New York
City, where the lives of four outsiders become entwined, bringing
irrevocable change to them all

New York, 1895. Sylvan
Threadgill, a night soiler cleaning out the privies behind the tenement
houses, finds an abandoned newborn baby in the muck. An orphan himself,
Sylvan rescues the child, determined to find where she belongs.

Odile
Church and her beautiful sister, Belle, were raised amid the applause
and magical pageantry of The Church of Marvels, their mother’s
spectacular Coney Island sideshow. But the Church has burnt to the
ground, their mother dead in its ashes. Now Belle, the family’s star,
has vanished into the bowels of Manhattan, leaving Odile alone and
desperate to find her.

A young woman named Alphie awakens to find
herself trapped across the river in Blackwell’s Lunatic Asylum—sure
that her imprisonment is a ruse by her husband’s vile, overbearing
mother. On the ward she meets another young woman of ethereal beauty who
does not speak, a girl with an extraordinary talent that might save
them both.

As these strangers’ lives become increasingly
connected, their stories and secrets unfold. Moving from the Coney
Island seashore to the tenement-studded streets of the Lower East Side, a
spectacular human circus to a brutal, terrifying asylum, Church of Marvels
takes readers back to turn-of-the-century New York—a city of hardship
and dreams, love and loneliness, hope and danger. In magnetic, luminous
prose, Leslie Parry offers a richly atmospheric vision of the past in a
narrative of astonishing beauty, full of wondrous enchantments-a
marvelous debut that will leave readers breathless.